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- Convenors:
-
Jessica Cooper
(University of Edinburgh)
Tobias Kelly (University of Edinburgh)
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- Stream:
- Morality and Legality
- Sessions:
- Friday 2 April, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
What happens to our understanding of responsibility when we think through notions of complicity?
Long Abstract:
Scholarship across political anthropology has engaged the concept of responsibility as a local and analytical concept that stitches together legal and moral systems (Cooper 2018; Dave 2014; Davis 2012; Jain 2006; Kelly 2011; Lambek 2010; Nelson 2009; Trinka and Trundle 2014; Wright 2018). Much of this work focuses on responsibility as a form of liberal governance and ideology; a precisely demarcated set of individualised causal relations through which the potentiality of justice under liberal law emanates. Ethnographic work has also shown the vast complexities of negotiations around the meaning of responsibility in different contexts. But what happens to our understanding of responsibility when we think through notions of complicity: a sense of our mutual involvement with others in the perpetration of harm? This panel asks what forms of ethical relation might overlap and depart from an analytical and empirical focus on responsibility. It offers a consideration of complicity as an ethical, social and political relation that can run through, across or adjacent to claims of responsibility. We ask what ethical imperatives and relationships are brought into view when we foreground complicities across different scales? What are the limits of a concept like complicity? And how might turning to complicity help us to make better sense of the everyday negotiation of ethics and politics across ethnographic sites?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 2 April, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
People navigating the ‘hostile environment’ in Glasgow encounter and articulate multiple forms of complicity. ‘Thinking like’ the Home Office can here mean risking complicity in one’s own harm, along with questioning the complicity of others: NGO workers, campaign groups, and academic researchers.
Paper long abstract:
Discourses of complicity are a central part of the UK asylum system, with the ‘hostile environment’ being one attempt to create an atmosphere in which a proliferation of people become ‘complicit’ in the ‘illegality’ of others - across education, healthcare, housing and public life. Concurrently, people navigating the asylum system regularly articulate and share their own critiques of complicity, levelled at NGOs, campaign groups, Home Office representatives, political figures and academic researchers. Based on 12 months’ fieldwork with people going through the asylum system in Glasgow, this paper will investigate these differing everyday questions of becoming complicit. What kinds of ethics emanate from an NGO training that advises caseworkers to ‘think like the Home Office’? How do group discussions of self-care and personal responsibility shift, often in the face of tragedy or failure, into ones of complicity? Such questions foreground the difficulty of limiting ideas of complicity to the harm of ‘the other’, with one woman stating, “you know the Home Office is in my head, when I fight them, I fight myself, I hurt myself.” To engage in the asylum system is here is to form personal strategies of complicity and compliance as a “deliberative ethical moment” (Mattingly, 2014), in ways that unsettle any clear contrast between “moral tragedy” and “flourishing”, complicating both anthropological and activist assumptions. And yet, such narratives of complicity may imply a solidity to the concept that, in a system which is often very difficult to discern, can be elusive: what are we complicit ‘with’?
Paper short abstract:
in China, complicity is seen as a problem and an aberration, whereas in the Wa State of Myanmar it is actively encouraged. The difference is explained by the presence (or absence) of nation-state institutions.
Paper long abstract:
People in China have to deal with radical tensions between vernacular sociality and official discourse. Shared recognition of such sources of shame can lead to a sense of complicity. For instance, the complicity of those who understand that wasteful consumption is part of local etiquette yet cannot be shown to urbanites and officials. Historically, communities of complicity are tied to core elements of nation-state modernity, including general literacy, mass media, and government bureaucracy. That is, institutions that accord responsibility to individuals, and thus create an environment in which complicity easily turns into shame. In the absence of the same institutions, co-responsibility is the default situation and thus complicity is generally seen as a positive achievement (rather than an abomination). We can identify those good and bad versions of complicity in the different shapes the same campaigns to eradicate superstition took in central China and in the Wa State of Myanmar. Predicated on the overwhelming force and impact of nation-state institutions, in China, complicity easily turns into abjection. Good complicity, however, emerges in the environment of the Wa State, where nation-state institutions remain weak: here, complicity is positively encouraged and cultivated as co-responsibility, even by local elites.
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers a therapeutic approach to psychological crisis that views language as potentially harmful, and struggles with its own complicity in the perpetration of that harm.
Paper long abstract:
If acting through complicity can be understood as a form of taking responsibility, while reckoning with one’s role in doing harm, as I have previously argued, what happens when that doing of harm is sensed in the use of speech and language that is a ubiquitous part of human communication? In this paper I consider this question in the intimate, intersubjective therapeutic domain, specifically as it is mobilized in response to psychological crisis. With reference to my ethnographic research on a therapeutic approach being introduced in the UK that distances itself from diagnostic language, clinical hierarchies, and psychoanalytic interpretations, I explore the avoidance of certain kinds of therapeutic speech and knowledge practices as an encounter with their complicity in psychological harm. Where my interlocutors emphasise the healing force of silence, embodied attunement, and communication through the repetition of the other’s words, I trace their forging of the therapeutic as a space and practice that attempts to recognize, and thus to avoid, the harm that subjects may do each other merely through using speech and language. This form of care for those experiencing psychological distress thus echoes the Levinasian idea that attempts to know and to represent the other through the use of language is in itself a form of violence, and that communication always entails some complicity. I argue that the ways in which this therapeutic approach considers harm as integral to intersubjectivity reflects a cultural politics that discloses but also struggles with complicity as a form of responsibility.
Paper short abstract:
When Sarajevo was besieged by Bosnian Serb forces, Serbs inside the city became suspected of collusion, and faced violent retribution. This paper explores wartime complicity through the prism of neighbourly relations, analyzing how the boundaries of moral communities are redrawn in times of war.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores wartime complicity through the prism of neighbourly relations inside besieged Sarajevo. From 1992 to 1995, the city was held under siege by Bosnian Serb forces. For Serb civilians inside the city, their ethnic association with the besieging army made them suspect as potential traitors, and rendered them vulnerable to retribution, in what I conceptualize as the siege’s hidden “internal zone” of violence. Based on one year of fieldwork (2017 to 2018) with Bosnian Serb women, I describe their social decline from “neighbours” to “aggressors” inside the siege. I trace how the moral contract of komšiluk (neighbourliness), understood as a lived responsibility for one another, bent under the weight of war.As numerous Serb women emphasized, “it mattered who your neighbours were.” Neighbours could insulate you, vouch for you, protect you. But they could also betray you, accuse you, endanger you. Complicity thus shot in multiple directions, as those who accused their Serb neighbours of collusion themselves became complicit in new cycles of retributive violence. This paper demonstrates how the boundaries of moral communities are redrawn in wartime, as the answer to the question, “What do we owe each other?” is re-opened and re-negotiated. It also shines a light on instances of care and cooperation among neighbours who refused to let themselves be divided along ethnic lines, and who in their cooperation made the siege more bearable for one another.